Follow my build of a Boeing 737 simulator in my guest bedroom! You decide whether this is a healthy hobby or a total anorak obsession...

Monday, March 5, 2012

Prosim 737 vs Project Magenta - review

Since I'm so easily distracted I'll share my review of Prosim 737 over a number of posts, comparing how it performs over Project Magenta. First, a brief test and short video of an engine fire drill.

The hardware is a CP Flight fire control panel and Fly Engravity six pack and warning/caution buttons. Bottom line - without any configuration, the systems work plug and play. The instructor station where you dial in the failures is self explanatory and automatically triggers cascading failures based on what you set up. I could never get this working with Project Magenta. Heck, until now I couldn't use the fire control panel other than through the CP Flight test program.

My second observation (not captured in a photo) is that Prosim 737's emulation of the FMC/CDU works better than Project Magenta in one respect - the altitudes set on waypoints in the STAR don't change as you progress to landing. Now this might be how the real CDU works (feel free to correct me) but I always found it really irritating that in Project Magenta, the altitudes would change, varying from the published STAR. I even noticed this on the commercial sim I flew in Sydney (they too use Project Magenta).

What else? Oh I got the TQ working again. In SIOC the 2 motor devices got swapped (don't know how). Once reset in the SIOC config, most seems to work fine. Air brake is still stuck in the armed position - still need to figure that out.

All for now - will report on more findings as I go through the shake down tests.